Apparently four out of five viewers between 18 and 25 put subtitles on – but it is not for the reasons you might think, writes the Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi
irst there were the creaky knees and a newly sprouted chin hair . Now, my journey from carefree youth to cranky middle-age has taken on a new element: I’ve started to watch TV with subtitles on. I don’t know whether it’s my ageing ear, sound mixing or modern acting techniques, but actors seem to mumble a lot these days. And the background noise is often way louder than the dialogue. Not as loud as the ads, though. Those are, by design, significantly louder than the shows.
Turns out I’m not quite over the hill yet: my TV-watching habits are all the rage among kids these days. A studyfound that four out of five viewers aged between 18 and 25 said they use subtitles “all or part of the time” compared with only a quarter of those aged between 56 and 75.
There is also, of course, the fact that many of us now watch television while simultaneously staring at our phones. As one young person stated, in a recent piece titled , captions allow people to “flick their eyes up and read ahead, then take in the whole scene quickly, and look back down at their phone”. I’m not a gen-Zer, but I’m guilty as charged.
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